Agreed. I think Basil did himself a major disservice by just brushing over that. To top it, WoW's economy is split over loads of servers: EVE online's is truly global.

All materials procured by players, refined and processed by players, to be sold to players (in the form of weapons/ammo/ships/etc.) and used by players. Often by different people, since you can't have alts for different aspects of the "professions" unlike with WoW. You *can* theoretically learn everything yourself given time, but the most profits are to be had with specialization, so being a jack-of-all trades is a trade-off, much more than in WoW (where it's enough to level a few crafting alts each expansion).

Other than that, I was a bit ... annoyed at some of the answers too. Not the 5man one so much (although an answer other than just irrelevant would've been nice). The fact that the "best" raid to him is the current one does come off as arrogant, especially to me, someone who raided in vanilla, where none of the raids ever really went obsolete in the same sense they do now (with smaller raidsizes and widespread PUGgin), but rather everything depended on your guild's progress.

I guess I got the feeling that he acknowledges that anyone can make money with even small time investments, but also basically says that unless you're doing the heroic 25man version of the newest raid tier, you don't matter, or your efforts are somehow less meaningful.

Oh, and Alliance has (nearly) always come off as racist, genocidal s to me. Ever since Warcraft 3, or was it the expansion... anyway.